Embodiments of the invention described in this specification relate generally to tactile stimuli and feedback devices, and more particularly, to a wearable time device that provides a tactile sensation indicating the passage of time.
To find out the time from a wrist watch, one typically needs to look down at the watch. An ordinary watch provides no unobtrusive indication of the passage of time without requiring the wearer to disrupt their visual attention. As a result, current time-telling devices require users to constantly check the time visually.
Existing wrist watches and cell phones provide us with information visually, but our sense of vision is frequently obstructed or needed to perform other tasks. A person may not be able to look at the time as displayed on a wrist watch, for example, when engaged in a sports activity, while driving a vehicle, or when doing anything that requires visual focus and attention. By doing so, the person would unnecessarily increase the likelihood of bad outcomes. Even if the person is able to divert his or her visual focus for only a short amount of time (e.g., a second or two to look down at a wrist watch), the resulting exposure to a bad outcome may be unjustifiably high. For instance, a vehicle collision or a big sports play can occur in an instant of time. Thus, unnecessary risk or loss of attentive engagement results when the person diverts visual attention to any existing wrist watch or wearable time device.
Therefore, what is needed is a way to provide temporal information through tactile stimuli that can be received by a person wearing a wearable device even when he or she is looking elsewhere or which can inform a person who is blind or visually impaired of the temporal information.